The soviet communism, wasn't really a communism, yes, but it certainly is a big government paradise and I doubt if the true communism, if ever created, would fare better in purely economic sense.

My question is whether soviet economic system is really a failure? I generally dislike socialism and is no doubt glad that the USSR was gone but if you're looking at what they have archived so far in purely utility value, they're very impressive for a nation where literacy was a rarity. I am not only talking about all the weapon they created but the their medical technology, standard of living, urban development etc. while not always the best in the world, they are no doubt impressive even when compare to the first world nation like the Europe or USA.

Perhaps what really caused the soviet downfall is not exactly their economic system but their commitment to the Cold War for decades. They can create that mush despite generally waste it on the military anyway. Perhaps if they don't go to war with the west and keep their ideology to themselves, their economy might be one of the most successful case of development in the world.

People tend to look at communism as a monster of the cold war era, but communism as an idea is previous. When an idea is contextualized within the situation of a country at a particular era, it ends up being very different from what had been written on the theory. In an era of peace, communism seems like a great idea, in a context of war (cold war or war against a particular country) it can mean the enslaving of the population (URS), or it can even be perversed beyond imagination until nothing remains of it (North Korea). The same can be applied to capitalism, not long ago in the capitalist USA, workers had an absolute lack of rights and were practicaly enslaved to work in factories performing chain-working in return for a pittance. Not to mention the horrors of free-market and oligopoly that we are living today under the economical crysis created by the capitalist model.

So no, I don't think communism is a disfunctional idea, but it just not perfect and it is difficult to contextualize it without making it look that the country is a dictatorship.

The Soviet Union wasn't communist. Communism is a phase in which a society is stateless, classless, moneyless, and the means of production are controlled by the workers who work them. Lenin's authoritarian brand of socialism could never allow for this since it requires the state to abolish and limit it's own power. Which goes against the class interests of the state. Because of this, it was incredibly easy for dictators to form cryto-fascist regimes not just in the U.S.S.R., but in China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.

To put it bluntly, Lenin's revolution in Russia was a complete catastrophe for the theory of communism. If a more libertarian socialist approach (autonomist/libertarian Marxist, anarchist, council communist, etc.) had been used, dictators wouldn't have been able to seize total control.

Communism itself is a great idea, and is the basis of things we use in day-to-day life (such as public libraries, Wikipedia, file-sharing, etc.). However, the usual means of implementing it (vanguard parties, in coalition to parliamentary action) are empirically flawed.

At 7/30/2014 2:28:53 PM, Otokage wrote:People tend to look at communism as a monster of the cold war era, but communism as an idea is previous. When an idea is contextualized within the situation of a country at a particular era, it ends up being very different from what had been written on the theory. In an era of peace, communism seems like a great idea, in a context of war (cold war or war against a particular country) it can mean the enslaving of the population (URS), or it can even be perversed beyond imagination until nothing remains of it (North Korea). The same can be applied to capitalism, not long ago in the capitalist USA, workers had an absolute lack of rights and were practicaly enslaved to work in factories performing chain-working in return for a pittance. Not to mention the horrors of free-market and oligopoly that we are living today under the economical crysis created by the capitalist model.

So no, I don't think communism is a disfunctional idea, but it just not perfect and it is difficult to contextualize it without making it look that the country is a dictatorship.

It is probably a bad idea regardless of time, the Cold War may wasted many of the resources they had archived so far and sealed their fate in the modern era, but even if that wasn't happened, force confiscation of other people property is still bad, very bad. And they will have to do it anyway because that's the key element that enable them to archive what they have archived. The soviet would never be a soviet without the biggest possible government in history isn't it?

Remember, we're talking about communism as in an economic system of the USSR not the communist utopia.

Economically, up until the stagnation of the 60s, the USSR was ok if you disregard the famines caused by Stalin on purpose to quash proletarian rebellion. What it wasn't was communist. It was a centralised command economy of which the defining aspect was its totalitarianism and no effort was being made to abolish exploitation, let alone wage slavery, since the state performed the exact same tasks of exploitation and oppression of the proletariat as businesses do under corporate capitalism. The USSR isn't a testament to the success or failure of communism, but a testament to the efficiency or inefficiency, depending on your opinion of the USSR's economy, of massive centralisation and state power.

I'd say that the USSR was doomed to fail from the very start. It was a spectacular bourgeois con by the Bolsheviks and the entire, bureaucracy-choked, corrupt system of so-called "democratic," centralism is engineered so that a dictator can rise to power and the state can perpetuate itself instead of withering away. This is shown by the way every single Stalinist state ever created has failed in almost exactly the same way. Totalitarian state capitalism eradicates the productivity-enhancing and economically beneficial aspects of corporate capitalism without removing the oppression, so in my opinion it's worse.

At 7/30/2014 3:59:23 AM, suttichart.denpruektham wrote:The soviet communism, wasn't really a communism, yes, but it certainly is a big government paradise and I doubt if the true communism, if ever created, would fare better in purely economic sense.

My question is whether soviet economic system is really a failure? I generally dislike socialism and is no doubt glad that the USSR was gone but if you're looking at what they have archived so far in purely utility value, they're very impressive for a nation where literacy was a rarity. I am not only talking about all the weapon they created but the their medical technology, standard of living, urban development etc. while not always the best in the world, they are no doubt impressive even when compare to the first world nation like the Europe or USA.

Perhaps what really caused the soviet downfall is not exactly their economic system but their commitment to the Cold War for decades. They can create that mush despite generally waste it on the military anyway. Perhaps if they don't go to war with the west and keep their ideology to themselves, their economy might be one of the most successful case of development in the world.

Any economic system that relies on robbing Peter to pay Paul will always, without fail,cause Peter to quit working and then the entire population will live in squalor while the govt elite live in opulence.

Beware of the people who are in your circle but are not in your corner.

At 7/30/2014 4:36:11 PM, Chimera wrote:The Soviet Union wasn't communist. Communism is a phase in which a society is stateless, classless, moneyless, and the means of production are controlled by the workers who work them. Lenin's authoritarian brand of socialism could never allow for this since it requires the state to abolish and limit it's own power. Which goes against the class interests of the state. Because of this, it was incredibly easy for dictators to form cryto-fascist regimes not just in the U.S.S.R., but in China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.

To put it bluntly, Lenin's revolution in Russia was a complete catastrophe for the theory of communism. If a more libertarian socialist approach (autonomist/libertarian Marxist, anarchist, council communist, etc.) had been used, dictators wouldn't have been able to seize total control.

Communism itself is a great idea, and is the basis of things we use in day-to-day life (such as public libraries, Wikipedia, file-sharing, etc.). However, the usual means of implementing it (vanguard parties, in coalition to parliamentary action) are empirically flawed.

To be fair, Lenin did try. When faced with hordes of starving people and with no way to encourage farmers to produce more, it was either force the economy at gunpoint or starve.

Workers just don't know what the other worker wants. That's the problem.

Crying about how much the Trump wall is going to cost is like a heroin addict complaining about how much the needles cost.

At 7/30/2014 4:36:11 PM, Chimera wrote:The Soviet Union wasn't communist. Communism is a phase in which a society is stateless, classless, moneyless, and the means of production are controlled by the workers who work them. Lenin's authoritarian brand of socialism could never allow for this since it requires the state to abolish and limit it's own power. Which goes against the class interests of the state. Because of this, it was incredibly easy for dictators to form cryto-fascist regimes not just in the U.S.S.R., but in China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.

To put it bluntly, Lenin's revolution in Russia was a complete catastrophe for the theory of communism. If a more libertarian socialist approach (autonomist/libertarian Marxist, anarchist, council communist, etc.) had been used, dictators wouldn't have been able to seize total control.

Communism itself is a great idea, and is the basis of things we use in day-to-day life (such as public libraries, Wikipedia, file-sharing, etc.). However, the usual means of implementing it (vanguard parties, in coalition to parliamentary action) are empirically flawed.

To be fair, Lenin did try. When faced with hordes of starving people and with no way to encourage farmers to produce more, it was either force the economy at gunpoint or starve.

Lol. Lenin was a dictator, plain and simple. He just couldn't accept for some silly reason that working class people were capable of running their own lives. If anything, he shot his own revolution in the foot by giving the minority power over the masses. If he wanted to encourage farmers to produce more, he should have given them more autonomy within the workplace, and destroyed the division of labor. However, destroying the division of labor relies on destroying the state, which Lenin didn't want because he thought the workers were too stupid to know what was best for them. Which is possibly, even though i'm a communist and have some degree of respect for Lenin, the single most retarded thing i've ever heard.

Workers just don't know what the other worker wants. That's the problem.

That's the problem with Leninism and authoritarian socialism. This is solved by allowing the workers to deal with their own problems. Giving workers their own autonomy in the workplace would empower them to make their lives better, since they would believe that their life and work has intrinsic value. Thus spurring innovation and happiness.

At 8/2/2014 8:42:10 AM, Material_Girl wrote:Economically, up until the stagnation of the 60s, the USSR was ok if you disregard the famines caused by Stalin on purpose to quash proletarian rebellion. What it wasn't was communist. It was a centralised command economy of which the defining aspect was its totalitarianism and no effort was being made to abolish exploitation, let alone wage slavery, since the state performed the exact same tasks of exploitation and oppression of the proletariat as businesses do under corporate capitalism. The USSR isn't a testament to the success or failure of communism, but a testament to the efficiency or inefficiency, depending on your opinion of the USSR's economy, of massive centralisation and state power.

I'd say that the USSR was doomed to fail from the very start. It was a spectacular bourgeois con by the Bolsheviks and the entire, bureaucracy-choked, corrupt system of so-called "democratic," centralism is engineered so that a dictator can rise to power and the state can perpetuate itself instead of withering away. This is shown by the way every single Stalinist state ever created has failed in almost exactly the same way. Totalitarian state capitalism eradicates the productivity-enhancing and economically beneficial aspects of corporate capitalism without removing the oppression, so in my opinion it's worse.

Well, that's the subject of this discussion. Personally, I don't know. They seem to be able to manage themselves despite all those energetic (and wasteful) aggressive foreign policy and defence spending.

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

, since they would believe that their life and work has intrinsic value. Thus spurring innovation and happiness.

That's the problem. workers defining their own value of their own work won't supply their fellow worker with the stuff he needs. It's arbitrary supply when the producers decide what is in demand, not the consumer. At least a dictator can see with charts, figures, and death tolls an idea of what the fellow workers need.

Lenin really grappled with the reality of that one for a long time.

Crying about how much the Trump wall is going to cost is like a heroin addict complaining about how much the needles cost.

, since they would believe that their life and work has intrinsic value. Thus spurring innovation and happiness.

That's the problem. workers defining their own value of their own work won't supply their fellow worker with the stuff he needs. It's arbitrary supply when the producers decide what is in demand, not the consumer. At least a dictator can see with charts, figures, and death tolls an idea of what the fellow workers need.

A vanguard party doesn't know what/how much a proletarian needs to be satisfied. The best way of measuring needs is through self-judgement, the foundation of more localized, democratic worker's cooperatives and communes can solve this. Workers in cooperatives should be able to decide what is needed for their own lives, and be able to acquire such amount at the commons. All Lenin's dictatorship did was make wealth flow upwards only to be redistributed based on the vanguard's subjective views on needs. If wealth was directly distributed (through self-judgement) based on needs within a local commune, then needs would be met more effectively and without totalitarian relations.

The state can only, in actuality, serve the needs of the minority (in this case, the 'revolutionary vanguard') who puppets it. This is why Soviet Russia was a failure. The idea that proletarians are too stupid to know what they need is silly.

Simply saying that Lenin is a legitimate ruler since he wanted to 'help' Russia is erroneous. I could say that Hitler wanted to 'help' Germany from starvation and poverty, which he did, but does this legitimize Hitler as a ruler? No. In Russia, the masses were still subservient to the ruling class. However, instead of Tsarists, it was a domination by so called intelligentsia who had a class interest in maintaining their power over the institution they ruled. As opposed to letting it wither away in to the hands of the proletariat. There is no justification for dictatorship, even the most imperfect republic is better than any enlightened monarch. Because even the most enlightened monarch can't give you autonomy.

Lenin really grappled with the reality of that one for a long time.

All Lenin did was create a one-party state-capitalist dictatorship. He hardly implemented realistic socialist efforts to help Russia progress. He is a disgrace to socialism. He should have smashed down the state the first chance he had.

At 8/2/2014 8:42:10 AM, Material_Girl wrote:Economically, up until the stagnation of the 60s, the USSR was ok if you disregard the famines caused by Stalin on purpose to quash proletarian rebellion. What it wasn't was communist. It was a centralised command economy of which the defining aspect was its totalitarianism and no effort was being made to abolish exploitation, let alone wage slavery, since the state performed the exact same tasks of exploitation and oppression of the proletariat as businesses do under corporate capitalism. The USSR isn't a testament to the success or failure of communism, but a testament to the efficiency or inefficiency, depending on your opinion of the USSR's economy, of massive centralisation and state power.

I'd say that the USSR was doomed to fail from the very start. It was a spectacular bourgeois con by the Bolsheviks and the entire, bureaucracy-choked, corrupt system of so-called "democratic," centralism is engineered so that a dictator can rise to power and the state can perpetuate itself instead of withering away. This is shown by the way every single Stalinist state ever created has failed in almost exactly the same way. Totalitarian state capitalism eradicates the productivity-enhancing and economically beneficial aspects of corporate capitalism without removing the oppression, so in my opinion it's worse.

Well, that's the subject of this discussion. Personally, I don't know. They seem to be able to manage themselves despite all those energetic (and wasteful) aggressive foreign policy and defence spending.

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

Maybe not economically, but socially...I know of no system that is more of a social #epicfail than red fascism/Stalinism.

, since they would believe that their life and work has intrinsic value. Thus spurring innovation and happiness.

That's the problem. workers defining their own value of their own work won't supply their fellow worker with the stuff he needs. It's arbitrary supply when the producers decide what is in demand, not the consumer. At least a dictator can see with charts, figures, and death tolls an idea of what the fellow workers need.

Lenin really grappled with the reality of that one for a long time.

You see though, this is a misconception of what socialism is. Under socialism, a business would operate in ways similar to a democratic government. The workers would elect someone to manage them, who would then go on to hire qualified people for different positions.

Capitalism does the same thing, instead whomever owns the business makes these decisions.

At 8/2/2014 8:42:10 AM, Material_Girl wrote:Economically, up until the stagnation of the 60s, the USSR was ok if you disregard the famines caused by Stalin on purpose to quash proletarian rebellion. What it wasn't was communist. It was a centralised command economy of which the defining aspect was its totalitarianism and no effort was being made to abolish exploitation, let alone wage slavery, since the state performed the exact same tasks of exploitation and oppression of the proletariat as businesses do under corporate capitalism. The USSR isn't a testament to the success or failure of communism, but a testament to the efficiency or inefficiency, depending on your opinion of the USSR's economy, of massive centralisation and state power.

I'd say that the USSR was doomed to fail from the very start. It was a spectacular bourgeois con by the Bolsheviks and the entire, bureaucracy-choked, corrupt system of so-called "democratic," centralism is engineered so that a dictator can rise to power and the state can perpetuate itself instead of withering away. This is shown by the way every single Stalinist state ever created has failed in almost exactly the same way. Totalitarian state capitalism eradicates the productivity-enhancing and economically beneficial aspects of corporate capitalism without removing the oppression, so in my opinion it's worse.

Well, that's the subject of this discussion. Personally, I don't know. They seem to be able to manage themselves despite all those energetic (and wasteful) aggressive foreign policy and defence spending.

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

Maybe not economically, but socially...I know of no system that is more of a social #epicfail than red fascism/Stalinism.

May be, but society is also based on economy. People do live some where because they can make a living there. If the economic is not epic fail, then I still don't call their society an epic fail - they just bad, very bad but still manage to avoid an F.

At 8/2/2014 8:42:10 AM, Material_Girl wrote:Economically, up until the stagnation of the 60s, the USSR was ok if you disregard the famines caused by Stalin on purpose to quash proletarian rebellion. What it wasn't was communist. It was a centralised command economy of which the defining aspect was its totalitarianism and no effort was being made to abolish exploitation, let alone wage slavery, since the state performed the exact same tasks of exploitation and oppression of the proletariat as businesses do under corporate capitalism. The USSR isn't a testament to the success or failure of communism, but a testament to the efficiency or inefficiency, depending on your opinion of the USSR's economy, of massive centralisation and state power.

I'd say that the USSR was doomed to fail from the very start. It was a spectacular bourgeois con by the Bolsheviks and the entire, bureaucracy-choked, corrupt system of so-called "democratic," centralism is engineered so that a dictator can rise to power and the state can perpetuate itself instead of withering away. This is shown by the way every single Stalinist state ever created has failed in almost exactly the same way. Totalitarian state capitalism eradicates the productivity-enhancing and economically beneficial aspects of corporate capitalism without removing the oppression, so in my opinion it's worse.

This post makes a lot of sense, although I'd add the caveat that EVERY government system is "doomed to fail from the very start". Every democracy in history has failed...the question is not whether or not current democracies will fail, but when they will fail.

At 8/9/2013 9:41:24 AM, wrichcirw wrote:
If you are civil with me, I will be civil to you. If you decide to bring unreasonable animosity to bear in a reasonable discussion, then what would you expect other than to get flustered?

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

If there was no such need, there would be no such need for a government in the first place.

At 8/9/2013 9:41:24 AM, wrichcirw wrote:
If you are civil with me, I will be civil to you. If you decide to bring unreasonable animosity to bear in a reasonable discussion, then what would you expect other than to get flustered?

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

If there was no such need, there would be no such need for a government in the first place.

There are plenty of socialist states that are not militaristic. I am quite interest in how the USSR develop itself, they seem to be going quite ok, at least when compare to the pre-communist Russia. That's make me wonder, if the collapse of USSR economy is really because the failure in their philosophy (as in case of Japan) or is it because of unwise foreign policy and the massive amount resources required to fuel it.

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

If there was no such need, there would be no such need for a government in the first place.

There are plenty of socialist states that are not militaristic.

You are conflating "militaristic" with "a need for a military". Societies can easily have the latter while not being labeled the former.

As it is, every government has a military/enforcement arm without exception. It is THE defining characteristic of ANY government. Without it, a government could not perform its most fundamental responsibilities in the domestic or foreign realms - arbitration and threat elimination respectively.

I am quite interest in how the USSR develop itself, they seem to be going quite ok, at least when compare to the pre-communist Russia. That's make me wonder, if the collapse of USSR economy is really because the failure in their philosophy (as in case of Japan) or is it because of unwise foreign policy and the massive amount resources required to fuel it.

I think it failed because of two things - 1) Gorbachev, and 2) a huge decline in energy prices concomitant with Gorbachev's rule which destroyed the Russian economy. I could be wrong on this, I haven't studied this much at all in detail, but that is my operating explanation for it.

At 8/9/2013 9:41:24 AM, wrichcirw wrote:
If you are civil with me, I will be civil to you. If you decide to bring unreasonable animosity to bear in a reasonable discussion, then what would you expect other than to get flustered?

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

Ah, ok. I think I may have misinterpreted your statement originally.

What you're asking about is what the USSR would have been like had it not prioritized its military. The answer is simple...it would have been conquered. In the Korean War, the US would not have been afraid to stop at China's borders, would have been much less inhibited about using nuclear weapons during that war, would have taken Beijing and may have launched a second offensive in eastern Europe to occupy Moscow. After all, you're essentially robbing the USSR of any ability to defend itself.

At 8/9/2013 9:41:24 AM, wrichcirw wrote:
If you are civil with me, I will be civil to you. If you decide to bring unreasonable animosity to bear in a reasonable discussion, then what would you expect other than to get flustered?

At 8/2/2014 8:42:10 AM, Material_Girl wrote:Economically, up until the stagnation of the 60s, the USSR was ok if you disregard the famines caused by Stalin on purpose to quash proletarian rebellion. What it wasn't was communist. It was a centralised command economy of which the defining aspect was its totalitarianism and no effort was being made to abolish exploitation, let alone wage slavery, since the state performed the exact same tasks of exploitation and oppression of the proletariat as businesses do under corporate capitalism. The USSR isn't a testament to the success or failure of communism, but a testament to the efficiency or inefficiency, depending on your opinion of the USSR's economy, of massive centralisation and state power.

I'd say that the USSR was doomed to fail from the very start. It was a spectacular bourgeois con by the Bolsheviks and the entire, bureaucracy-choked, corrupt system of so-called "democratic," centralism is engineered so that a dictator can rise to power and the state can perpetuate itself instead of withering away. This is shown by the way every single Stalinist state ever created has failed in almost exactly the same way. Totalitarian state capitalism eradicates the productivity-enhancing and economically beneficial aspects of corporate capitalism without removing the oppression, so in my opinion it's worse.

Well, that's the subject of this discussion. Personally, I don't know. They seem to be able to manage themselves despite all those energetic (and wasteful) aggressive foreign policy and defence spending.

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

Maybe not economically, but socially...I know of no system that is more of a social #epicfail than red fascism/Stalinism.

May be, but society is also based on economy. People do live some where because they can make a living there. If the economic is not epic fail, then I still don't call their society an epic fail - they just bad, very bad but still manage to avoid an F.

If there was decent economic growth and productivity in the USSR and it all just went to paying for the fancy houses, luxury food and prostitutes of Politburo officials (in other words, the 1%), then I would still call it a fail. I guess failure is subjective.

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

If there was no such need, there would be no such need for a government in the first place.

There are plenty of socialist states that are not militaristic. I am quite interest in how the USSR develop itself, they seem to be going quite ok, at least when compare to the pre-communist Russia. That's make me wonder, if the collapse of USSR economy is really because the failure in their philosophy (as in case of Japan) or is it because of unwise foreign policy and the massive amount resources required to fuel it.

I would also add that you need to keep in mind that Russia had just been invaded by Germany. Any militaristic reaction needs to take this into account. Russia perceived, probably rightly so, that it had to prioritize its military far more than it had before WWII, and so it did.

At 8/9/2013 9:41:24 AM, wrichcirw wrote:
If you are civil with me, I will be civil to you. If you decide to bring unreasonable animosity to bear in a reasonable discussion, then what would you expect other than to get flustered?

I think it failed because of two things - 1) Gorbachev, and 2) a huge decline in energy prices concomitant with Gorbachev's rule which destroyed the Russian economy. I could be wrong on this, I haven't studied this much at all in detail, but that is my operating explanation for it.

Gorbachev did play a major part for its downfall but if memory served me right, the USSR economy was in the state of hyperinflation, stagnation, and shortage long before Gorbachev took power. I could be wrong on this though.

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

Ah, ok. I think I may have misinterpreted your statement originally.

What you're asking about is what the USSR would have been like had it not prioritized its military. The answer is simple...it would have been conquered. In the Korean War, the US would not have been afraid to stop at China's borders, would have been much less inhibited about using nuclear weapons during that war, would have taken Beijing and may have launched a second offensive in eastern Europe to occupy Moscow. After all, you're essentially robbing the USSR of any ability to defend itself.

There are a lot of reasons of how the USSR could resist, but I will just leave it at this: The Soviet armed forces is literally collapsed with the fall of the USSR, your country didn't take this chance to invade or simply nuke it to the stone age even when the result can be guaranteed (to some extent anyway). I see no reason why would you want to do it then, if the USSR didn't post itself as a threat i.e. keep its socialism to itself, never really occupied the Eastern Europe, take no involvement at all in China Civil War, and Korean War, and trade with its neighbour.

If there was decent economic growth and productivity in the USSR and it all just went to paying for the fancy houses, luxury food and prostitutes of Politburo officials (in other words, the 1%), then I would still call it a fail. I guess failure is subjective.

..... under those definitions, the US would be even more of an epic fail than the USSR I guest?

There's nothing wrong about income inequality to me, the 1% can have whatever luxuries they want so long as they can have access to resources - enough to make a life worth living. And as matter of fact, the only way for resources to be adequately distributed, sustainably, is to produced enough of them in the first place.

Let's say if the USSR never spend a single coin on military, no armed forces, no conscription, no defence research, only minimum police forces to keep the population in order, would you still think that they are doom to fail? I don't know.

Ah, ok. I think I may have misinterpreted your statement originally.

What you're asking about is what the USSR would have been like had it not prioritized its military. The answer is simple...it would have been conquered. In the Korean War, the US would not have been afraid to stop at China's borders, would have been much less inhibited about using nuclear weapons during that war, would have taken Beijing and may have launched a second offensive in eastern Europe to occupy Moscow. After all, you're essentially robbing the USSR of any ability to defend itself.

There are a lot of reasons of how the USSR could resist, but I will just leave it at this: The Soviet armed forces is literally collapsed with the fall of the USSR, your country didn't take this chance to invade or simply nuke it to the stone age even when the result can be guaranteed (to some extent anyway). I see no reason why would you want to do it then, if the USSR didn't post itself as a threat i.e. keep its socialism to itself, never really occupied the Eastern Europe, take no involvement at all in China Civil War, and Korean War, and trade with its neighbour.

1) The collapse of the USSR was not concomitant with a collapse of Russia as a nuclear power. This alone would deter aggressive US action in the region, in fact my understanding is that the formation of Ukraine as an "independent" polity was predicated upon returning USSR nukes stationed in Ukraine back to Russia as early as 1994 i.e. in the midst of the weakest point of Russia as a polity.2) The USSR was heavily involved in the formation of the Chinese Communist party and provided military equipment to the CCP during the Chinese Civil war, so they were heavily involved in that conflict as well.3) The USSR had a military alliance with China and directly participated in the Korean war, so I have no idea how you can say anything to the contrary.4) There was much trade in Europe shortly before WWII...in fact, Americans like Henry Ford ran factories in Nazi Germany as late as 1940, after the outbreak of WWII. Trade is not an indicator of good political relations.

At 8/9/2013 9:41:24 AM, wrichcirw wrote:
If you are civil with me, I will be civil to you. If you decide to bring unreasonable animosity to bear in a reasonable discussion, then what would you expect other than to get flustered?

At 7/30/2014 4:36:11 PM, Chimera wrote:Communism itself is a great idea, and is the basis of things we use in day-to-day life (such as public libraries, Wikipedia, file-sharing, etc.). However, the usual means of implementing it (vanguard parties, in coalition to parliamentary action) are empirically flawed.

Very few people use a public library every day, especially since kindles exist so you can just download anything. IMO a privately owned library would be way better, and it would probably not be filled with weird homeless people and out of date computers. With Wikipedia, and so on, these things only occur in this way where scarcity is not at all an issue. The internet has such a capacity for text and images that Wikipedia can be run in a way that resembles communism. However, if my life were run like Wikipedia, that would mean anyone could at any time 'edit' my actions, and 'edit' my food and property away from me, which would not be my idea of a utopia (unless there were infinite prosperity, which is impossible).

At 7/30/2014 4:36:11 PM, Chimera wrote:Communism itself is a great idea, and is the basis of things we use in day-to-day life (such as public libraries, Wikipedia, file-sharing, etc.). However, the usual means of implementing it (vanguard parties, in coalition to parliamentary action) are empirically flawed.

Very few people use a public library every day, especially since kindles exist so you can just download anything. IMO a privately owned library would be way better, and it would probably not be filled with weird homeless people and out of date computers. With Wikipedia, and so on, these things only occur in this way where scarcity is not at all an issue. The internet has such a capacity for text and images that Wikipedia can be run in a way that resembles communism. However, if my life were run like Wikipedia, that would mean anyone could at any time 'edit' my actions, and 'edit' my food and property away from me, which would not be my idea of a utopia (unless there were infinite prosperity, which is impossible).

It isn't necesarrily the idea of a library being 'public' (that being, funded by the state) that makes it an example of communism. But more or less that a library runs off of the communist maxim: 'from each according to their abilities (the library itself provides its abilities, through librarians), to each according to their needs (your needs are met by this ability).

As for your statement on kindles and etc., not everyone owns a kindle, or has access to the internet. Which is a reason why these 'homeless people' that your talking about are in the library (1, for its ability to provide knowledge, and 2, for shelter). In a communist society however, there wouldn't be class. So these homeless people wouldn't exist.

A private library would just cause information asymmetry. People of a higher class would be able to obtain knowledge from the library's abilities (as the private owner of the library would be restricted by the laws of profitability, and would probably charge an entry fee, or charge money for ownership of the library's books), whereas the poor would have far less access than before. In an ideal society, the libraries would be run by in local area that it is a part of, and through a democratic process.

As for your statement on scarcity, scarcity only becomes an issue within the economics of the past. It is an issue that can (though, maybe not entirely) be overcome. If there was more wealth equality within a society, scarcity would be far less of an issue due to the super-escalation of production/productive capacity that technology has given us. I'm not saying that there would necessarily, without a doubt, be a society of post-scarcity. But we can't say that such a society wouldn't be possible if goods were produced, managed, used, and recycled more efficiently.

However, that not what I meant when I spoke of Wikipedia. I was more referring to how it is a great example of common ownership. In communism, people's lives would not run in a way that resembles Wikipedia. The means of production and land however, would be commonly owned.

Also, communism is not an attempt at utopia. I (a very staunch proponent of it) don't even think it will be utopia. But it will still be far better than the exploitative, murderous, imperialist, unequal, inefficient, patriarchal, nationalistic, racist, homophobic/trans-phobic, ecocidal death machine we have today.

At 8/20/2014 3:25:39 PM, PotBelliedGeek wrote:The grammar nazi in me is melting at this thread.

You commi!

~JohnMaynardKeynes

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